New capacities for student equity and widening participation in higher education

This special issue of Critical Studies in Education has its origins in the research of Australia’s National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education and a national conference it convened in October 2010, organized around the theme: ‘Aspiration, Mobility, Voice’. Contributors to the special issue include National Centre researchers and international keynote speakers who presented at the conference. (Reflections by these speakers on the conference theme also appear at the end of the issue.) As a collection, the special issue presents the case for a new way of thinking about student equity and widening participation in higher education (HE). This thinking is prompted by a new ‘structure of feeling’ (Lingard & Gale, 2007; Williams, 1961) now emerging in response to changing social and economic relations and, in part, to changing structural arrangements in the HE systems of OECD nations. Following the conference theme, the authors in this special issue address a new appreciation for student equity defined in terms of ‘mobility’, ‘aspiration’ and ‘voice’, conceived as capacities for widening HE participation, which shift focus and approach beyond narrow renditions of barriers to access (Sellar & Gale, this issue), the latter is an implicitly deficit account (Gale et al., 2010, p. 2; see also Smith, this issue) that still informs many institutional programs and government policy.